Perhaps no area of China-related scholarship has taken longer to recover from the access limitations of the mid-twentieth century than the study of Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of Xinjiang was so fashionable that it had a wide following in the Western popular press, where the region was better known as Chinese Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, or Eastern Turkistan. When the turmoil of the Republican and Mao eras made the region almost entirely inaccessible to outsiders, the study of Xinjiang began a long sojourn in the Western academic wilderness. After all, the earlier interest had always been tinged with Orientalist travel fantasy and imperial desires that required scholarly boots on the ground.

This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes “distant reading” methods in the humanities and the authors’ corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors’ data; discusses complementary relationships between machine learning and human expertise; explains topics represented in Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi that set each of those texts apart from the other two; and explains topics that intersect all three texts. The authors’ results confirm many scholarly opinions derived from close-reading methods, suggest a reappraisal of Xunzi’s shared semantic content with Analects, and yield several actionable research questions for traditional scholarship. The aim of this article is to initiate a new conversation about implications of machine learning for the study of Asian texts.

Men's references to women's writing in vernacular Korean script never term this practice “calligraphy,” and yet articles of women's intricate brushwork reveal that in late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) this was a highly aestheticized practice with recognized social importance and a meticulous training process. This article captures the moment when vernacular Korean scriptural practices ascended the elite canon, which resulted in the emergence of high vernacular culture. It historicizes the gendered logic of representation in a male-authored historical archive to uncover the contours of a women-centered vernacular aesthetic canon that assumed a status of prestige alongside male culture in literary Chinese. The article unravels the meaning of the term “calligraphy” when it is applied to women's vernacular handwriting and ponders the connection between women's bodily discipline, productive work, and exquisite vernacular brushwork. This opens an alternative perspective not only on the gender politics of the Chosŏn society but also on the culture of the time, which is hitherto seen as dominated by a male-centered literary Chinese canon.

Previously unexamined written, visual, and performative channels of communication between central government officials and local Buddhist monks call for a nuanced understanding of sociopolitical connections between the capital and the provinces of late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Via a multidisciplinary approach, this article addresses the patronage of three shrines dedicated to meritorious Buddhist monk-generals and martyrs who fought during the Japanese invasions (1592–98). Male and female members of the central elite supported the construction of the shrines in order to advance their respective political ambitions. Discontented with court factionalism, the central elite wielded their support of the shrines as a shaming device against their opponents and/or corrupt officials, while Buddhist monks sought to gain social recognition and enhance their respective monastery's political caché by maintaining the shrines, and by performing Confucian commemoration rituals with royal support.

The Vietnamese story about the arrival of Buddhism and the building of the first Buddhist temples in what is now northern Vietnam contains no distinctively Buddhist content, but rather is a tale of thaumaturgy, the worship of trees and of rocks, and rainmaking. This essay analyzes the textual history of the story, which is dated in the early third century CE. It examines the names of the two major protagonists of the story and, although the names were later absorbed into the Sinitic literary tradition, this study proposes a Tamil Hindu origin for them. One is reminded of the trade route that connected India and China along the coasts of Southeast Asia at that time; the evidence of Brahmans from India in early Southeast Asia, including northern Vietnam; and evidence of Hindu elements in Vietnamese texts.

Why are histories of colonialism and religious transformation in Southeast Asia so often told as inextricably interrelated? Why were Buddhist movements identified as both the locus for resistance to colonialism and the central means of constructing colonial modernity? Part of the reason lies in how religion served as both a European technique of colonial governmentality and a local repository of techniques for comprehending and responding to change. More than this, religion seems to have offered a multivalent medium for a variety of innovations. Pali examinations were central to Buddhist reform in colonial Burma at the turn of the twentieth century but also fomented conflicts between the colonial state and monastic factions over the purpose of language study. However, beyond such conflicts, Pali examinations proved fertile grounds for Buddhist laypeople to experiment with multiple interpretations of what Buddhist modernity might mean in Burma.

As the East India Company prepared for its First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42), its officials grew suspicious of a Muslim uprising within British India. They became convinced that itinerant Muslim reformers—mislabeled “Wahhabis”—were inciting princes of India's Deccan region to rebellion. This article describes how the very talk of this “Wahhabi conspiracy” not only triggered the interventionist impulses of the colonial state, but also inspired local intrigues associated with the downfall of two Indo-Afghan princes of the Deccan, Kurnool's Ghulam Rasul Khan and Udayagiri's Abbas Ali Khan. In both cases a preoccupation with the transnational Wahhabi operative masked local and sometimes petty interests, which drove the politics of these smaller regimes. The case studies of Kurnool and Udayagiri illustrate how news of events arising in one region of imperial conflict could “travel” to remote regions of India's Deccan, evolving into conspiracy narratives along the way. The discourse of conspiracy provided a pretext for military action and the annexation of territory. The story being told, however, is not simply about paranoid colonial officers who were all too eager to intervene, but is also about local entrepreneurs who knew how to exploit the situation toward their own ends.

A former part of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China, upon Tokyo's defeat, in 1945. Two years later, a revolt broke out against the mainland Chinese authorities and was brutally crushed. This episode, known as the February 28 Incident, has been at the center of memory wars in Taiwan since democratization. Historical accounts have tended to focus on the background causes of the Incident and on the role played by the Taiwanese elite. This article argues that devoting more attention to grassroots participants and their repertoire of action can shed new light on the events. During World War II, many young Taiwanese were mobilized in the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. This experience persisted in collective memory after Japan's defeat. During the revolt, young Taiwanese spontaneously “remobilized” the repertoire of actions and symbols formed during the war, with important consequences.

Rabindranath Tagore's visit to China in 1924 was a milestone in the May Fourth Movement's envisioning of modern literature as a vehicle for social transformation. Moving beyond interpretations of the visit as a political failure, this article locates the reception of Tagore's ideal of Eastern spirituality within the larger climate of literary production, specifically in new poetry. Through close reading of poems by Xu Zhimo and Bing Xin, this article argues that Tagore's ideas were fundamental for the development of poetry as an interpersonal medium that both portrays and effects social bonds. This understanding developed as Chinese poets and literary critics engaged with Tagore's critique of Western materialism and his positioning of Asian religious sensibilities in contrast to Western materialism. Tagore's view promoted literature as a medium connecting religion, the individual, and the universe. In this sense, though Tagore's pan-Asianism failed as a viable political project, it carried powerful resonance in the arena of modern Chinese literature.

This article examines how Chinese national values are imparted to and through the recent phenomenon of ceremonial volunteers or etiquette volunteers (liyi zhiyuan). These volunteers are all young college women who serve at major national events by greeting guests, ushering, and holding ceremonial ribbons. They are supposed to embody Confucian ritual values and the practices of propriety that define China as a nation of civilization through their roles as ceremonial hostesses. This feminine symbol of national tradition and cultural virtues is realized through a heavy emphasis on discipline, physical training, compliance to authority, and collectivism expressed through the ways the performances are staged and mass mediated. This article argues that the ceremonial volunteer represents a new state effort to engineer a model woman citizen by combining the Confucian discourse on etiquette, the communist party-state discourse on militarization and strong womanhood, the communist sport tradition of body training, and the latest initiatives on volunteering. The result is the making of gendered national subjects, marking new values of class, femininity, and nationalism. This article contributes to the understanding of emergent values about gender, class, volunteering, and the important roles they play in the process of citizen making in today's China.